‘There’s magic in the air’: Former masonic hall becomes heart of Co Derry community

Michael Downes was walking his dog past Culmore Community Hub when a voice said, “come in”. “I’ve never left,” he laughs.

“You just feel like you belong when you’re here. It’s like a family,” adds Kiera O’Donnell. “There’s magic in the air … it’s like a whole circle of love and helping and friendship.”

Strewn in Christmas decorations, with a brightly-lit tree outside and overlooking the river Foyle, the community centre does look magical.

Once a masonic hall – it still retains the original stained-glass windows complete with masonic symbols – the restored building has become the centre of an area which, until it opened in 2021, didn’t realise how much it needed it.

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Now with a population of more than 3,500, what was once a small village between Derry city and the Border has rapidly expanded as the boundaries of the city pushed outwards, but with few facilities to support the many developments of new homes.

“There was never anything in Culmore, there was no community development at all,” says Hub manager Una Cooper. “We were starting from absolutely ground zero.”

Approximately half a million pounds of funding from the National Lottery’s Community Fund enabled it to hire staff and begin running activities; the Hub now has about 1,000 attendances a week and more than 70 volunteers – “our lifeblood,” says Cooper.

“Because people in Culmore went without it for so long, they were so grateful, and really see the benefit. I think they were ready to be part of a community and have learned the value of it.

“It’s given Culmore a heart.”

Both Downes and O’Donnell know this all too well. “You can have a house here and sleep in it, but that doesn’t mean you’re living here,” says Downes.

“Now I’ve actually started getting involved in the community I feel I actually belong here, that I’m actually living here, and I’m sure it’s not just me that feels like that.”

He was running a successful business in England when he came back to Culmore to look after his parents: “Mum got dementia, dad had Parkinson’s, and that was it for 10 years or so, it was just the three of us and you don’t go out the door, and I changed. Something inside me broke.”

His father died, then his brother suddenly, from cancer, then his mother. “Before everything fell apart, I was a very confident manager, I was good at everything I did, obnoxiously so, I would say … I went from that to struggling to go out the door, but I don’t feel like that here [in the Hub].”

How does he feel? “Safe.”

Downes now volunteers at the Hub; he is involved in its annual literary festival “and a couple of other wee projects, I used to build currachs and I even managed to get hold of some e***ts in a currach, and I’ve started sailing again.

“I’m going out and doing things again and I have a partner now and we’re just back from Germany.

“I’ll never be back to what I was, but I’m being the best me I can be.”

“It’s been life-changing, totally life-changing,” says O’Donnell. As well as volunteering at the Hub, she facilitates arts and crafts classes, which helped her start her own craft business.

A mother of six children aged between five and 17, when her seventh child died she struggled to leave the house. “People going through grief or any kind of trauma in their life know that nothing can change unless you get the thing you really want. That’s the thing you can’t have, so they think ‘no, out there’s not going to help me’, but taking that step out does.

“So many times, I thought I should message the Hub, and I thought, ‘I can’t do it’, and then I did it … that was the start of it, and I went home and thought, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, but it feels totally right’. And from then on, I’ve never looked back.”

Her whole family are now regulars at the Hub. If she is taking a class and her children are off school, they come and join in. For her eldest – now 17 – who really “struggled a lot over lockdown”, the youth club was “the best thing that happened to her. She’s shining now”.

That sense of hope nurtured in the Hub extends far beyond. “The knowledge and power we have coming from here is extended outside,” she says. “This is like a pebble in a pond, and the ripples do go out from this place,” adds Downes.

Cooper outlines the Hub’s many plans, from developing pitches and a playpark to the restoration of the historic Culmore Fort. Another recent lottery award has allowed it to expand its youth club to five nights a week and from 240 to 400 places; she estimates the Hub’s efforts have brought around £2 million into the area.

“I think the pandemic, followed by the cost-of-living crisis, has been the most difficult period for people, and that’s saying something coming from Derry and what we all went through [during the Troubles],” says Cooper.

“A lot of people who were just sailing through their life had never really experienced isolation, loneliness, maybe financial difficulties for the first time, so there was a lot going on globally that had an effect on this community.

“I think people were ripe for this building to open, and it happened.”

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